Punk Psych - The Idle Race
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Artist:
Time for a taste of English.
Without the brutality of the draft siphoning off fodder for the Vietnam War, English psychedlia always sounded lighter and a bit fey. After all, they had Peter Pan and Wind In The Willows in their genes.The Idle Race was the first band of Jeff Lynne, where he learned all the tricks that brought him fame in ELO a few years later. Birmingham is known as the British home of heavy metal - The Sabs, Slade, The Move, Robert Plant - but you'll have a hard time finding it here. Percy Plant still has an ongoing fascination with West Coast psychdelia, so maybe it was (and is) something in the water.
Locating MOG account...
Comments (6)
I need to keep up! This isn't the first post of yours that I've stumbled on some time later that I'd wish I'd read earlier. As an avid ELO/Jeff Lynne fan, I've been trying to work backward and explore his roots. I've picked up the Move's Shazam and Message From The Country, but am finally listening to the Idle Race's Back to The Story, and I'm speechless. It's so obvious the influence of the band on Jeff and vice versa! The melodies, the harmonies and arrangements are all much more obvious as pre-ELO than the Move's stuff was.
Let's face it, the height of Jeff's lyric-writing was "Can't Get It Out of My Head," and the lyrics on this album are as disjointed and trippy as some of his later stuff, but Lynne has always been about the arrangements and melodies anyway, right?
I must now go read your entries for the last 2 years! LOL
Hi KK - thanks for the comments. It allowed me to upload the track again with a working player.
An engineer friend of mine worked with Kynne. He said Jeff told him to seta few knobs and outboard gear at certain points and out came the Jeff Lyne sound. He was susrprised by how simple it all was.